it's been a long time since my boss called me into their office and gave me
a string talking to it wasn't easy and I had it coming but the good news is that
most of what the boss that's you is asking for has been underway for months
or in some cases even years that's why we're Under New Management
but as happy as I am that taryn's here
he can't make these kinds of changes alone which is why step one was an all
hands meeting to hear directly from everyone on our team and step two was to
kick off an unprecedented company-wide period of introspection no videos no
tweets no product launches for an entire
week we have done almost nothing but dig through every misstep and conduct
face-to-face meetings between our teams with the goal of surfacing the
communication and the teamwork challenges that have brought us to this
point it's been a bit of a roller coaster full of passionate disagreement
and then finding common ground Aaron Grievances and then reconciliation
but through it all we put together a plan it took longer than the week that
we promised you but the way that I see it that's not a bug that's a feature and
it underscores our new commitment to do whatever it takes to move Beyond just
entertainment to become the authoritative voice that you guys deserve and the one that we all want to
be before I laid it out though I just want to address two important groups
first to everyone who wanted to see us Rise Up
from this better than ever I just want to say thank you for being here
um thank you for sharing our passion for technology
um thank you for the countless messages that you guys have sent encouraging us
as we navigate this difficult time and most of all thank you for being
willing to criticize something that you love in order to make it better we're
here for you we are not going anywhere second I want to address everyone who
wanted to see us fail I guess all the same stuff
um we're here for you we're not going anywhere and you're going to have to
deal with that let's kick off with the content reforms then shall we for starters along with
our reduction NVIDIA output to get a handle on all of our new quality focused
process changes we have officially killed the haven't missed an upload in
10 plus years mentality and we've made it explicitly clear that if a video is
not ready for prime time we're going to stop the presses until we've had a
chance to make the proper fixes now that might sometimes come in the form of an
on-screen correction but there's going to be better transparency we've created
a clear rubric that defines error severity and prescribes the appropriate
fix which can range from a pinned comment to a full reshoot or even the
outright cancellation of the video you're going to find that linked down
below second we've made significant changes to project management and load
balancing with a prioritization on in-person meetings to help Define
project scope and ensure that everyone is aligned our expectation going forward
is that nobody is ever just making
graphs about something that hasn't been explained to them or that they don't
fully understand this will not only improve accuracy but it will give us the
opportunity to present data in more interesting and more digestible ways
I've actually got a preview of what this might look like from an upcoming video
that the Labs team is super proud of where they're analyzing the consistency
of performance across a 12 unit sampling of what are supposedly identical AMD
ryzen processors based on these preliminary results looks
like you can buy the exact same computer as your friend and end up with pretty
different performance interesting if true
of course I'm not going to ask you to take my word for it we have a lot of
progress to make on our goal of publishing our full testing methodologies but we've opened up the
Forum thread that we promised soliciting feedback and we've outlined the dates
that we're expecting to deliver on some of our methodologies and the open
sourcing of our in-game testing harnesses for those who don't want to click the
link you can expect to find some updates around the middle of September
a good methodology is only a small part of the battle though and if there's one
thing that we learned from all of this it's that we need better processes for
accuracy checking the good news is that flowcharts are
good for more than just memes and we have just such a process now every video
with Labs testing will be checked by Labs one to two times before shooting
and then an additional time after the video has been edited any show stopping
issues found during these reviews will do exactly that they will stop the show
you guys deserve better than what we've delivered up until this time and that's
what we want to give you after our internal reviews this week we
have unlisted and demonetized multiple videos that contained erroneous data and
we will be updating or otherwise issuing error Corrections on others you'll find
a link to a summary of these changes to previous Labs content down below but our
priority going forward is to publish our error Corrections according to the new
guidelines that I gave you guys a moment ago one problem that we can't solve
internally is that nobody can know everything and even experts can make
mistakes that's why we're kicking off the error checking Community or ECC
Squad it's still in the alpha stage right now with a group of fewer than 10
extremely knowledgeable community members and we may or we may not ever
expand beyond that but we are going to have a link down below if you're
interested in hearing more about this program in the event that we roll it out
more broadly in the short term as we roll out all our new processes and
inevitably find some wrinkles these folks might find stuff that does get
missed but in the longer term our goal is to have our internal systems be so
solid that the ECC Squad pretty much turns into a free Early Access group for
subject matter experts in our community with the odd
um actually to help us do better now something I want to be clear about
is that you are still going to see some ad hoc less formal testing I mean we've
got a video coming up where I'm fixing my computer and I've run over to Lucas
in the lab to help diagnose a dead power supply we're going to conduct quick and
dirty tests where we just take two laptops and Press buttons and how long it takes to
open an application sometimes the full treatment isn't
necessary but we're going to make sure that we are
clearly communicating that to you finally recognizing that Improvement is
a journey not a destination we're using our Newfound time to run weekly writing
team postmortems to identify the areas where we're killing it
and the ones where we're really not our
findings will be used to both improve accuracy and also the quality of our
content moving on to the business side of things there's not much changing here
except more transparency and that's actually a common theme throughout all
of this we've recognized many of our
biggest areas for improvement for years I mean that's why we have the
sponsor complaint thread on the forum for example which we've now committed to
providing weekly updates on and that's why we had our internal sponsorship
guidelines which now you will find linked down below available in public
that's also why we brought in an experienced manager Taryn who is
off-site this week or I would have brought him in to chat with you guys as well there are some other changes we've
committed to and followed through on providing more proactive information to
our team during crisis time we've built out a clear schedule for one-on-ones
between team members and managers and we've established a path to reducing the
number of direct reports for each manager and a bunch of other stuff that
we're going to continue to work on in the background I do think one of the most pressing
things that you guys want to hear about though is that we have revised our
process for item tracking to a heartbeat system that requires our procurement
team to follow up pending projects and update their status
they didn't do anything wrong before but
this should help to avoid any confusion going forward around items that start
out as we don't need it back and then turn into a loan later on I do not want
to see something accidentally end up in the Christmas party pile or any other
don't need it anymore pile again now
let's talk about our workplace culture we offer a solid benefits package
including extended Health mental health and dental coverage as well as
Retirement savings contributions and matching we proactively host regular
team building events including summer of fun which gives every full-time local
employee up to 300 to spend on any activities they want with other members
of our team bi-weekly gaming nights in the lounge with free food weekly
badminton nights bi-weekly softball nights and a quarterly budget for
department-wide team building events we organize occasional surprise field trips
where people are paid to have fun together and our Christmas parties are
legendary with surprise bonuses that over the years have included free
laptops wild raffle prize halls and ten
thousand dollars in bonus money per person not once but twice on that last
one and while we don't make a point of talking about that stuff much and while
Our intention was never to publish our findings earlier this year we also asked
our HR team to conduct one-on-one meetings company-wide to identify key
issues and do a temperature check to see how everyone was feeling our
communication internally about the actions we've taken based on the surveys
hasn't been perfect we've gotten some feedback that the Monday morning meeting
notes are dense and hard to parse but in
June we laid out a road map for many of the improvements that we had already
made or planned to make based on the one-on-ones
now for those of you paying very close attention you probably heard me mention
our HR team which isn't consistent with
the impression that many people seem to have of our structure here a portion of
our community seems to think that the only option to report grievances here is
to your boss or to your other boss and I
just don't really know what to say other than that is simply not the case
there was a time when we were very small and yes I did handle all the HR
complaints that was years ago and the same is true
for Yvonne in 2018 we passed 25
employees and we engaged an outside HR Council to advise us on what we were
doing right and what could be done better in 2020 we grew to 40 team
members and we brought in an outside HR firm making them available to all
employees if they needed to talk to them this was on top of the usual recommended
conflict resolution steps of discussing your issue with the other person talking
to your manager talking to their manager talking to ownership or filling out an
anonymous feedback form then as we approached 100 team members we added a
dedicated in-house HR department with the goal of providing even more
resources to our team to be clear Yvonne and I do both still
have an open door policy so team members do still have the option of talking to
us directly if that's their preference
and I don't know how to emphasize this enough
everything that I just talked about existed before last week this is not
some kind of knee-jerk reactionary Corporal nonsense the one exception the
one new thing is the emergency upgrade that we made to our health plan in
recent weeks a shocking number of our team members have been harassed bullied
and even threatened on social media so effective September 2023 we have doubled
our coverage for mental health counseling and
all I have to say other than that is that if you're one of the people who engaged in this Behavior I refuse to
refer to you as members of our community you know who you are and shame on you
not one of our team members deserved that
we have a zero tolerance policy for any of that crap and we always have
regarding our workload we work hard here
I've never denied that but we also aren't running some kind of
deranged Twitter 2.0 Ultra Hardcore
operation this is the morning and night
surveillance footage of our parking lot at the studio for five work days leading
up to our week of introspection we offer some flexibility around start and end
times so you'll see that some people roll in starting around 8 30 and then as
you can see the ones who arrive later are typically gone by around 6 30.
there are exceptions that Friday you'll see we were filming up until the WAN
show thanks guys also our cleaning
contractors come in after hours so that's um that's their van so that they
don't disrupt production and sometimes folks will stick around if they need a
big space for tabletop gaming but to characterize our environment as
some kind of 24 7 Sweatshop is frankly ridiculous
we also do work overtime sometimes
we're in a competitive industry it happens and I've never denied that
either but we care about our team and I
think this is reflected both in our commitment to cut content moving forward
until we get our house in order and in our historical turnover rate
from 2013 to 2023 inclusive our average
turnover rate was 7.5 percent with a median value of 7.7 those numbers
include both people who resigned their positions and people who were dismissed
for context according to Workforce research for Mercer the Canadian average
is 18 while in the U.S it's around 20 percent we have had two years over that
span that were less than exemplary but even then we were lower than average
removing the people who were dismissed from their positions we fall to 3.65
average 1.9 percent median being a media
company our departures are a little louder than most but in the grand scheme
of things I hope you guys can see that the numbers show there really aren't
that many of them but with that said we have heard you as
part of our unwavering commitment to improve our turnover may rise as we take
decisive steps to do better for you to be clear this is not supposed to be
stressful for the hard-working members of our team
we have no plans for layoffs we're even still hiring our rainy day fund is going
to comfortably carry us through this storm the vast majority of this team is world
class they care so much about our community and igniting passion for
technology and they are going to be here for you